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QC broken down after emerging?

I had a nice ripe capped queen cell in a queenless nuc that was due to emerge yesterday. I went to look today to see if it had emerged, expecting to see an open and empty QC, and there was no QC there at all anymore, just a smooth dimple in the comb as though nothing had ever been there! I had marked the frame and the side, and there were no remnants on other frames either. I know where it was, and now it's GONE.So my question is- do the bees sometimes break down and remove the empty QC the day after the virgin emerges, as part of their housekeeping maybe? Kind of weird!

The little bee returns with evening's gloom,
To join her comrades in the braided hive... -Tennyson

Re: QC broken down after emerging?

They are not normally that quick, in fact emerged cells can stay there for weeks.

More likely there was a problem with the cell and the bees have cleaned it up, but not possible to say for certain. Best next step would be to test the nuc by putting a frame of eggs in it, to see if they build cells, that will tell you if they are queenless or not.

Re: QC broken down after emerging?

Thanks Oldtimer
In fact, that's exactly what I did this morning! Sounds like I did the right thing then.

The main capped queen cell was gone, there were two other rather small queen cells in other places on that frame that did not look very robust. So knowing there were no more fresh eggs in that nuc, i stole another frame from my old queen's hive- brushed ALL the bees off it and made sure there were some eggs in it, and I put it in the nuc. I took out a semi-empty nuc frame, brushed the nuc bees off it, and exchanged it to replace where the egg frame used to be in the old queen hive. Swapped the frames but no bees, so there was no chance of accidentally moving any queens today.
If there's a new virgin queen in the nuc, the frame of eggs won't hurt anything.

Meanwhile, the queenless main hive (from where I took the ripe QC 4 days ago) has now built 2 new QCs from a fresh egg frame. I will leave those QCs in there for them to make their new queen. If i had more frames of bees and brood I'd make yet another nuc with one of those cells, but at this point I don't have enough extra resources so I wont right now. That hive is also now drawing comb in their foundationless honey super while busy raising a new queen, the comb is looking very straight and pretty.

The little bee returns with evening's gloom,
To join her comrades in the braided hive... -Tennyson